August 03, 2007

0vßß Event Generator – Week 5

Week five in the physics cave (literally – our office has no windows!) and we’ve made significant progress. For those of you reading this who forgot what it is we’re doing, the task is to create a program which simulates double-beta (ßß) decay events and produces a list of energies and angular distributions of the resultant particles.

The last few weeks involved implementing lots of helper functions and classes; numeric integration, a four-vector, various classes to represent different kinds of particles, and other associated trickery. This week, we started the biggest single part of the program; the event generation functionality itself.

At the start of this week we hoped to have this finished by today; unfortunately that did not happen! We’re getting close, though. Understanding what we have to do is half the task!